Leviathan or The Whale

one whale, the beast rounded on the whaleboat that pursued it, ‘and chewed her in many Hundred Pieces’.
    ‘Spouting good blood while Eating the Boats’, the animal set off, followed by its hunters, but as they drew close and the mate was about to lance it, the whale ‘turned upon him and Eat his Boat up also’. In the chaos, the captain dived in to save a drowning crewman, and brought him back to the boat; but the whale had not finished with them. In its flurry, it turned on its side, its jaw lunging at the captain. Only then did Sherman manage to ‘hove an Iron into him…and in a few moments he was in the Agonies of Death and Breathed his Last’.
    As he began to research his story, Melville found other accounts of avenging whales. The
Union
, a Nantucket ship, was lost off the Azores in 1807 after an attack by a whale, while a Russian vessel was raised three feet out of the water by ‘an uncommon large whale…larger than the ship itself’. Nor were sperm whales the only cetaceans able to stove a ship. Grey whales were called devil fish for their propensity to turn on their hunters, and fin whales, too, were known to charge and sink a vessel. Even smaller whales could be dangerous: at least one sailor was killed by a blackfish during Melville’s years of whaling.
    But it was the otherwise placid sperm whale that could do the most damage. In 1834 Ralph Waldo Emerson was riding in a stagecoach when he had heard a sailor talk of a white whale called Old Tom which attacked with its jaw, ‘& crushed the boats to small chips…A vessel was fitted out at New Bedford, he said, to take him.’ Gathering up these stories, Ishmael speaks of a confederacy of dæmonic whales which gained ‘an ocean-wide renown’, a veritable champions’ league: Timor Jack, ‘scarred like an iceberg’, a fearsome fighter who was only caught when a barrel lashed to the end of a harpoon with which he was tapped on the shoulder, distracted his attention while ‘means were found of giving him his death wound’; New Zealand Tom, which destroyed nine boats before breakfast and was ‘terror of all cruisers…in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land!’; and Don Miguel, another grizzled battler, ‘marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphs upon the back!’
    Of all such whales, the most vivid–because it came as a firsthand testimony–and the most infamous was the one that sank the
Essex
, an account of which was published in 1821 by the ship’s mate, Owen Chase. His title summed up the story sensationally, if not succinctly:
    N ARRATIVE OF THE M OST E XTRAORDINARY AND D ISTRESSING S HIPWRECK OF THE W HALE -S HIP E SSEX , OF N ANTUCKET : W HICH W AS A TTACKED AND F INALLY D ESTROYED BY A L ARGE S PERMACETI -W HALE IN THE P ACIFIC O CEAN .

    In his book (which to Melville bore ‘obvious tokens’ of having been dictated), the aptly named Chase describes how a bull sperm whale, apparently enraged by attacks on his fellow whales, came at the
Essex
at ‘twice his ordinary speed’, with ‘tenfold fury’ and ‘vengeance in his aspect’, his tail thrashing and his head halfway out of the water–a truly terrifying sight. Hitting the ship full-on, the whale smashed into her bows, then swam off to leeward and was not seen again. The resultant exchange between Captain Pollard and his first mate might have come from a 1940s British film.
    ‘My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter?’
‘We have been stove by a whale.’

    As the
Essex
sank, her crew were circled by the animals they had hunted, the whales unseen in the darkness, ‘blowing and spouting at a terrible rate’. Drifting on the ocean in open boats, the shipwrecked men could hear huge flukes thrashing furiously in the water, ‘and our weak minds pictured out their appalling and hideous aspects’. Yet it was not the whales they had to fear: it was their fellow man. The starving and thirst-maddened survivors refused to sail towards nearby islands for fear of their cannibal inhabitants–only to end up eating each other to stay alive.
    Melville claimed not only to have met Chase’s son, who lent him a copy of his father’s book–‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me’–he also maintained he had seen Owen Chase himself on his ship, the
William Wirt
. However, by the time Melville was sailing on the
Acushnet
, Chase had retired from the sea and was living alone in